Experts

Bernard Gwertzman

Bio

Bernard Gwertzman has spent his entire career in journalism, starting as a reporter for the Washington Star in Washington, DC, in 1960. There he covered the Cold War as a specialist on Communist affairs. In late 1968, he was hired by the New York Times and sent to Moscow as its bureau chief from 1969-71, where he covered the tensions along the Soviet-Chinese border and the first steps toward detente.

In 1971, Gwertzman returned to Washington, where he worked for the next sixteen years covering U.S. foreign policy for the Times. He traveled throughout the Middle East with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, where he charted the first Arab-Israeli accords, leading up to the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel brokered by President Carter in 1979. In that period, he also wrote extensively on the first arms control accords between the United States and Russia.

With the advent of President Reagan to the White House in 1981, he covered the chill in Soviet-American relations, followed by the warming of the Gorbachev-Reagan ties. In 1987, Gwertzman was invited to New York to become the deputy foreign editor of the Times, and in 1989, he became foreign editor. During his tenure as foreign editor, he directed the Times' coverage of the collapse of the Soviet empire, the Persian Gulf war, the U.S. invasion of Panama, the first Israeli agreement with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), and the outbreak of the Bosnian war. In the six years Mr. Gwertzman was at the helm, the New York Times won four Pulitzer Prizes for international coverage.

When the Times began its electronic division in the summer of 1995, Mr. Gwertzman shifted to new media. He was editor-in-chief of the New York Times on the web from 1996 until he retired from the Times in 2002. He has been consulting editor for cfr.org since October 2002. Gwertzman, who has an AB and MA from Harvard, is the co-author with Haynes Johnson of Fulbright: the Dissenter, and with Michael Kaufman on three anthologies on the fall of Communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union. He lives in Riverdale, NY, with his wife Marie-Jeanne. He has two married sons, James and Michael.

World powers are now offering to ease sanctions on Iran if it agrees to halt its most sensitive nuclear activity. Expert Daryl Kimball urges a full diplomatic press to stop Iran from crossing the nuclear weapons line.

In recent years, the strategic alliance between Iran and Hezbollah has grown to the point where the Lebanese militant group's fealty to Tehran is paramount, a dynamic currently on display in Syria, says counterterrorism expert Matthew Levitt.

Just days away from parliamentary elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is widely expected to form a new government in coming weeks, but what that coalition will look like is still unclear, says CFR's Robert M. Danin.

In this interview, CFR's James Lindsay discusses three major foreign policy challenges confronting the United States in 2013, including tumult in the Middle East, rising tensions in East Asia, and the U.S. fiscal cliff.

Moderator:

Cold War Reflections and Today's Realities

Speakers:

James M. Goldgeier, Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations, Council on Foreign Relations; Coauthor, "America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11", Robert M. Kimmitt, Senior International Counsel, WilmerHale; Former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs (1989-91), and Former U.S. Ambassador to Germany (1991-93)

Presider:

Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor, CFR.org; Former Foreign Editor, "The New York Times" (1989-96)